Christian Burton is a slightly built teenager with an angular nose and a long, sad face. When he was led into court Tuesday for a preliminary hearing on charges of murdering Santa Clara County paramedic Quinn Boyer, he took a seat reserved for bailiffs and attorneys.

His public defender, Ernie Castillo, had to tell him he belonged at the big table. It was the day before Burton's 17th birthday.

With any defendant in a notorious case, you wonder what led him to that seat. You wonder why he stands accused of firing a single shot from a .22-caliber gun that ended Boyer's life on April 2 in the hills of Oakland. You wonder at the senselessness of it all.

Tuesday's hearing didn't help much to clarify the puzzle. There were bits of news: Boyer had stopped his Honda Civic on Keller Avenue to text friends when he was spotted by five teenage boys in a stolen Dodge Intrepid.

Oakland police Sgt. Randy Brandwood testified that Burton told him he meant to rob Boyer of his iPhone and the gun went off by accident. The last part sounded implausible.

To be sure, a preliminary hearing isn't meant to answer all our questions. It's a dance of the seven veils by the prosecution, giving the judge just enough reason to hold a defendant for trial, as Judge Paul Delucchi swiftly did.

But the proceedings in Oakland, along with a couple of interviews, helped me understand the battle lines of the case and gave me more insight about Boyer.

Basic outlines

Under questioning by prosecutor Joseph Goethals, detective Brandwood, a younger, more taciturn version of Telly Savalas, gave the barest outline of the facts.

Yes, he had interviewed Burton on April 16, two weeks after the killing. Yes, the young men in the car had discussed robbing Boyer. Yes, Burton had admitted firing through the passenger window of the Civic when Boyer started to drive away.

Quinn Boyer (Photo Courtesy of the Boyer family)

When public defender Castillo asked questions, a little more emerged. The cops had let Burton sweat that early morning, putting him in the interrogation room at 5:22 a.m. and not talking to him until shortly after 7.

Then Castillo opened a line of attack dealing with the statement of a witness who identified the shooter as wearing a white hat. Earlier in the day, a video captured another of the five boys wearing a white hat. Brandwood wasn't having it: Burton was the guy.

A good man

All these issues are the stuff of lawyerly wrangling. What struck me beyond the hearing, however, were the insights that I got into the 34-year-old Boyer himself, a man who worked with disadvantaged kids.

We extol victims. We can do little else but extend our sympathy. In this case, though, all the praise was right. You had only to talk to Boyer's wife, Elizabeth, or his mother, Colette Quintero. Both talked about Boyer's love for Oakland, the same city of hard streets that produced Burton. Neither sounded vindictive.

"I have faith in the system,'' Quintero told me. "The fact that it was a 16-year-old is a tragedy. The whole thing is a tragedy. It was a tragedy for Quinn. He was just sitting there doing the right thing.''

Her son, who had just dropped his father off for a medical appointment, knew the rules of the road. He did not text and drive.